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A Young Gymnast’s Distant Olympic Dream

Alexis Page practices at Aviator Sports and Recreation in Brooklyn. Credit
Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times

On weekends, the subway and bus trip can take two and a half hours — each way, that is. Alexis Page, 13, is pursuing her sport, her art, from uptown Manhattan to the outer fringes of Brooklyn.

Millions of hopeful American youths ride to practice in team vans or their parents’ cars or perhaps they bicycle to a nearby field or gym. Alexis takes the No. 2 subway and the Q35 bus.

Her discipline is rhythmic gymnastics, twirling a ribbon, dancing with a ball, an Olympic sport that is obscure just about everywhere except the old Soviet bloc.

Alexis cannot afford to think about the Olympics themselves, she says softly. She must live within the moment of the music and the rhythm, and not think how she will pay for all this, or when she will sleep.

Her coaches, with the enduring poise of Soviet athletes, tell her she has it good. They tell stories of all-day training rather than the four-hour sessions she takes. They tell of children removed from their families to join the collective athletic system.

Alexis studies them, the way they walk, the way they talk. She is preparing for life, for college, not only the Olympics. She does not have time for a social life in her neighborhood; her friends are in the gym or on her Facebook page — girls from Russia, girls from Chicago, gymnasts, like herself. One of her friends is an octogenarian European gymnast, now living in New York.

Photo

Alexis Page, right, and her mother Pamela Fair on the No. 2 subway.Credit
Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times

It takes a village to produce a young woman with even a remote shot at the Olympics. Alexis has her mother, Pamela Fair, and her coaches, and her mentor, Wendy Hilliard, whose foundation helps subsidize the budget for this season, $25,000 and growing because of the increased travel in the junior program, the only pipeline to the Olympics.

This weekend, Alexis will fly to Chicago so her routine can be gauged for the judging at the national junior competition in Dallas Aug. 12-15. She needs to finish in the top eight to qualify for the national team, to qualify for federation funds, but even there the odds are steep: Often, only one woman from Canada to South America qualifies for the Summer Games.

She is a rhythmic gymnast by karmic accident. Her mom, a legal secretary, used to take her to work sometimes. A colleague, Bobby Mensah, who had played soccer back home in Ghana, told Hilliard, his fiancée and now his wife, about the athleticism of the little girl frolicking in the hallway.

Hilliard had learned her gymnastics back in Detroit, at the fabled Kronk gym, now closed but once home to some of the toughest boxers in the universe. Hilliard became an international-level athlete but she never reached the Olympics after rhythmic gymnastics was added in 1984. Once she was dropped from the United States’ group-performance squad because she “stood out.” She is still dealing with that.

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Hilliard, however, stayed with the sport, coaching Aliane Baquerot, an American Olympian in 1996, and also served as president of the Women’s Sports Foundation. Through the Wendy Hilliard Foundation, she runs a gymnastics program in Harlem, stressing academics and nutrition rather than competition, but Alexis was limber enough to move up.

In 2006, Hilliard closed her team program uptown and helped design a gymnastics center at Aviator Sports and Events Center, one of New York’s biggest secrets — a multi-purpose base for ice hockey, rock-climbing and other indoor sports, on the old Floyd Bennett Field, where Douglas Corrigan, forever known as Wrong Way, and many other famous aviators once flew.

Alexis and her mother had little choice but to follow, taking the train from West 116th Street, to the Brooklyn College stop, where they transfer to the bus. She may nap on her mom’s shoulder, but she keeps her eye on life around her.

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Alexis Page trains at a sports facility at Floyd Bennett FieldCredit
Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times

“There’s a man on the train who says he lost his daughter and doesn’t know what to do,” Alexis said. “I think, why not go to a shelter? I’ve seen him a few times. And there’s another man, not to say anything bad about him, but he has lost both eyes and has scars all over his face. He’s scary.”

Fair travels with her daughter in all seasons, braving the winter wind that blows across the old airstrip. Inside the Aviator center is a haven, with coaches Lucy Kerznerman, from the Soviet Union, and Silvia Taseva, a former Bulgarian athlete. They are attentive and realistic.

“It is hard,” Kerznerman said the other day. “She cannot think about the Olympics. No, no, no, no. She must have little goals, every day.”

Money is an issue. Hilliard’s foundation has covered more than $5,000 in expenses this year, but Fair estimates the expenses will run to $25,000 — four custom-made leotards, at more than $600 each, a dozen entry fees at $125 each, higher costs for higher competition.

Fair was laid off from her job last February. Her son, Larry Fair, is planning to attend college in the fall. Alexis plans to attend St. Jean Baptiste High in Manhattan because the school showed understanding of her rigorous schedule, her pursuit of excellence. She is an A student, even if her homework is done after the long trip home at night.

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Her mother is proud that Alexis thinks and speaks positively. There is no trace of the smart-aleck television shows aimed at young girls. Asked her favorite place in New York, Alexis replied, “Barnes and Noble.”

Alexis knows the odds are against her reaching the Olympics, and she will be happy to reach world competition. Rhythmic gymnastics is not a college sport, but she would like to think good grades and excellence in her discipline will appeal to an admissions officer.

Right now she must focus on the daily workout. Her coaches stand tall. She catches a red ball behind her back, ever so gracefully. Oh, and after the junior nationals in Dallas there will be the traditional party, with dancing. Alexis likes that part, too.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: Gymnast Swayed by Rhythms of the City. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe